“And the Skia?”
“They give him their souls when they become immortal. They’re robots who do his bidding with no will of their own. This is a horrible place, and the Skia exist in abject misery, but the lost souls are better off here than dying within humanity. At least this place gives them some hope, however small, and however much they don’t deserve it. Yes, it’s harsh, but they always pledge with their eyes wide open, well aware of what they’re doing.”
“Why do they do it? I don’t understand why someone would do it.”
“They turn their back on God for many reasons, but the heart of their motivation is always the eternal search for worth. People want to be worthy, they want to feel important and special. They’ll go to extreme lengths to get it, even handing their soul to Eryx. They don’t recognize the irony until it’s done, that worthiness comes from within, and no amount of props from others will ever fill the void. They could find peace and ease if they stopped trying so hard, because God gives every man dignity. Eryx gives them lies.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the Skia below. They were old and young, every race, male and female, tall and short. They were all naked and skeletally thin. Hungry. I knew what it was to be hungry. They looked up when the earth rumbled and I saw hope in their blistered, sweaty faces. When nothing happened, when no lost soul came hurtling into the cave, they resumed shuffling. Fights broke out occasionally, vicious and bloody, but worst of all, in an area closest to the wall with the least light, females screamed in agony and I didn’t have to look to know what was happening to them.
I couldn’t stop crying.
I couldn’t stop my heart breaking.
“Life is all about choices. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we have a choice in how we live through it and who we are. You’re here right now because God chose you to be Anabo, because you sacrificed yourself for Jordan, because you are one of those rare people who have compassion even for those who choose evil.”
“That’s not true. I never felt sorry for Emilian.”
“Feeling sorry for people means you have sympathy, which isn’t the same as compassion. What you feel for all others is hope. Regardless of who they are or what they do, you hope they’ll change, that they’ll be at peace. You never lose hope, never give up. You had many opportunities to kill him in self-defense, Mariah. Why didn’t you? Why did you keep trying, even in the face of his rage and hatred?”
I turned my head to stare at the stone behind us, unwilling and unable to look at the room below me any longer. “I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to be different. I hated him so much.”
The screams were killing me. They were me. They were my screams. The ones in my head, the ones into my legs while I sat on the roof, the ones I swallowed to keep him from hurting me worse. “Please take me away from here.”
Instantly, I was back in the little cabin, standing on the rug, Mary Michael’s arms around me. “We’re out of time, Mariah. You have to decide now if you will go back, or if I’ll take you to Heaven.”
I stepped away from her. “I could forget it all in Heaven. I’d never remember him, or what happened to me.”
She nodded slowly. “You’ll forget Phoenix and the Mephisto. All that will remain is your memory of your parents and Viorica. You’ll be sublimely happy, always safe, without sorrow, surrounded by love. Heaven is a marvelous state of being, and it’s well within your right to go there. Staying means you never lose the memory of Emilian. It means living with the insanely messed up boy who is my son. And it means taking the lost to Hell on Earth.” She began to fade. “Staying will be difficult, but potentially full of joy. Now, child. Decide now . . .”
I looked at Beet, whose tail was wagging. He barked. Bending to stroke his soft fur, I thought of Olga. Zee and Sasha and Kyros and Denys and Mathilda and all the rest. I thought of Viorica – Jordan. I’d barely had a chance to know her. Then I thought of Phoenix. Healing me, kissing me. Tell me what he did. An insanely messed up boy, and he was meant for me, an insanely messed up girl.
Beet barked once more before he disappeared.
In the end, the decision was a no-brainer. This was my destiny, what God intended for me. If I’d made it this far and survived, how hard could the rest of eternity be?
I said to the now empty room, “I’ll stay,” and darkness fell.
“Welcome back,” I heard Eryx say. I felt his hands on my torso, felt heat pulsating through me.
Blinking my eyes open, I looked up at his face, at his dead eyes. “Of course I won’t kill you,” I mimicked his low, deep voice.
Withdrawing his hands, he smiled and stood from where he’d kneeled next to me on the library sofa. “I couldn’t risk you dying and not being brought back. My brothers can screw up a train wreck.”
“How do you do it? How do they do it?”
“It’s a simple matter of sharing our life force with one who is dead.”
“Can you bring anyone back?”
“Not just anyone, no. My immortals belong to me before they die, so I can bring them back, kill them again, do whatever I like with them. My brothers aren’t allowed to resurrect anyone who’s not Anabo. They have rules. I don’t.”
“What about the Luminas?”
“They’re brought back by God.”
At a console below mullioned windows, he poured liquor into a cut crystal tumbler and brought it to me. “Have this. It’ll steady you.” He offered his hand and pulled me to a sit, then held out the glass.
I took it and sipped, appreciative of the heat as it travelled down my gullet and into my stomach. “What happened to my sweater?” I was wearing a black sweater that was much tighter than mine, and a pair of black stretch pants. “And my jeans?”
“You bled all over them. I’ve had my housekeeper dispose of them.”
“Whose clothes are these?”
“Does it matter?”
“No.” But I was curious. Had he bought clothes for Jordan? Was he that confident? Or did he have another girl who lived here with him? I tried not to think about him undressing and redressing me while I was dead. That took creepy into the stratosphere. “How could you be so sure I’d come back?”
“I wasn’t sure, but I weighed the odds and decided you’d be unwilling to leave your sister. My certainty grew after you died and I found this beneath your sweater.” He held up the golden phoenix I’d swiped from one of the boxes. “So you’re intended for Phoenix. I’m curious. What does he smell like?”
I wondered how he knew about the scent of Anabo and Mephisto? It seemed like something he shouldn’t know, like the Mephisto Covenant. The less he knew, the less he could use it against the Mephisto. “What a peculiar question. He smells like a guy. Sometimes like aftershave, sometimes cologne, sometimes sweat.” Always marvelous.
“If an Anabo is intended for a Mephisto, they have a certain scent, don’t they?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been with them that long. As for the necklace, I stole it, in case I went back to Bucharest. I could get a lot of money for it.”
“Why would you need money?”
“Why does anyone need money? To spend it.”
“No particular reason? Did you imagine you’d find a better place to live? Were you thinking of buying a car? Maybe you want to travel.”
He was good at digging, but I was equally good at never poking my head out of the hole. “I just thought it’d be some money. Now it doesn’t matter because I can’t go back to Bucharest, thanks to you.”
He handed me the phoenix, then poured himself a whiskey and took a seat beside me to drink it. “You were gone a while. Care to tell me where you went?”
“Hell on Earth. I said hey to all your converts.”
“You have a macabre sense of humor.”
I drained the whiskey and stared down at the candlelight reflected in the crystal. “Okay, so I didn’t say hey. I just watched their misery and thought that as horrible as their existence is, yours is
worse.”
“Oh?”
I turned my head to look at him. He appeared fascinated by me, staring into my eyes, clearly waiting for me to explain myself. “You want what your brothers have.”
“I have no light, no sentimentality, no love, no shred of honor. What makes you think I want brotherhood?”
“I don’t.”
“What, then?”
“You want hope. You think my sister will bring you hope.”
He surged from the sofa and went to set his glass down on the console. “We need to get back. Denys will sober up enough to miss you soon. I’ll have to give you the tour of my home some other time.”
I slipped the phoenix around my neck and let it drop beneath the sweater before I stood and walked toward him. He stiffened, which surprised me. I set my glass next to his and took his hand.
Seconds later, we stood in front of the bar in the empty, dark pub, scarcely lit by the streetlamps through the windows. He looked down at me as he released my hand. “You’re wrong, by the way.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“We’ll talk about it later, when you’re living with me.”
“Even if by some bizarre twist of fate my sister did agree to stay with you, I wouldn’t follow.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for one of my brothers.”
“I’ve been to Hell on Earth.”
“And you can’t wait to find more of my followers to send there?”
“I can’t wait to hand you your Waterloo.”
His black gaze swept me from head to toe and back again. “You’re almost as small as Jordan. A tiny warrior, are you, Mariah?”
Remembering the sweaty faces of the Skia, their skeletal bodies, their utter hopelessness, I said, “You have no idea.”
He bent low and looked closely at my face, at my eyes. “So much rage,” he whispered. “All for me?”
“No, it’s all for The Man.”
That made him laugh. He was still laughing when he disappeared.
I walked toward the hallway to the restrooms, but cut left this time and opened the door that said manager on the nameplate. Denys was stretched out on a leather couch, sound asleep, naked as the day he was born. He held equally naked Brianna next to him.
Welcome to Awkwardtown, population, me.
I stood there and thought about my room in the Mephisto mansion. My bed. Olga. I wanted to be there now. It was nine in Colorado, almost time for Jordan’s visit. And later, Phoenix would come. I wondered if he’d stay the night with me again. I wondered how he’d take the news that I’d become immortal.
I was still in shock, I think, and the enormity of it hadn’t yet hit me. For now, I wanted familiarity. I wanted my room and my cat and Mathilda to bring cocoa and her sweet British lilt. I didn’t want to wake up naked Denys and Brianna.
I could almost imagine I was there, in my room.
Gasping, I nearly fell down when darkness enveloped me, I felt the rush of transporting, and I was in my room.
I staggered a bit before regaining my balance and looked around, stunned. From the end of my bed, Olga meowed.
I grinned at her. “Righteous!”
Unimpressed, her eyes went to half-mast and she purred.
My delight in transporting dimmed a little when I realized Denys would wake up and completely freak out when he couldn’t find me. What a pain. He really needed to lay off the liquor.
I petted Olga, then concentrated on the spot where I’d stood before I left the pub manager’s office, gratified when seconds later, I was there once more.
Denys was still snoozing, but Brianna had moved. Her eyes were open and she saw me appear out of thin air. I opted to pretend it didn’t happen. “I’ve really got to get going. Will you wake him up and tell him I’ll be outside the pub, waiting?”
She blinked in confusion, but nodded, and I walked out of the office.
Ten minutes later, after I heard a heavy door close and assumed it was Brianna leaving via the back hall, along with Denys, who would have to pretend to leave as well, he popped into the pub as if this was all completely normal, his usual grin firmly in place. “Sorry about that, Mariah. I must have dozed off.”
“You were passed out.”
“Aw, come on, don’t be mad. Let me buy you some dinner and then I’ll take you home.”
“Denys, it’s the wee hours of the morning here and nine in Colorado. Let’s just go home now.”
“You’re mad.”
“No. Tired. It’s been a really long day.” I was also ravenously hungry and decided I’d go to the kitchen and ask Hans to give me some leftovers or something. “How are you this sober? Because earlier, you were clobbered.”
“It’s immortality. No drug lasts long in our system.” He grinned. “Takes a whole lotta booze to even get a buzz.”
“Does it help, Denys?”
His smile lost some of its brilliance. “Nothing helps, really, but it’s something to do.” His eyes narrowed and he came close to stare at me curiously. “You look different. Are you okay? What did you do while I was, uh, napping?”
“I helped Freddie clean the bar. Sort of like old times, you know?”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He wanted to believe me, so he did. People are funny like that. Give them an out when they act badly, and they’ll take it, every time. I should have told Denys what really happened, but I was feeling weird about it, and wanted to tell Phoenix first. I also wasn’t up for Denys’s inevitable guilt trip when he discovered I’d been taken by Eryx. I was back, no worse for wear. Well, other than being murdered and resurrected. And my new clothes were ruined.
But, really, otherwise, I was fine. No need for him to feel guilty, and besides, it wasn’t as if he forced me to go with him. Now, I just wanted to go home.
He took my hand and as we landed in the front hall, Deacon turned from dusting Jane’s portrait. “You’ve been missed.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“You misunderstand, Anabo. No one knew your whereabouts and there is a search taking place. It was assumed you were with Denys, but Kyros was unable to locate you at the establishment where he was imbibing too much liquor and disrespecting a female.” He went to the intercom box and his solemn voice echoed through the house, announcing my arrival, calling off the search.
“Oh, hell,” Denys mumbled. “I’m in for it, now.”
I moved a little closer and said under my voice, “I’ll tell them I wanted to be alone for a while and you took me to a church in London, where I was perfectly safe because it’s holy ground.”
He jerked his head around to look at me, astonishment in his eyes. “You’d lie for me? About church?”
“I’d rather not have to answer a lot of awkward questions. Just go along with what I say.”
“You can try, but for the record, you’re not safe inside a church. Eryx can’t go in, but Skia and lost souls can because, even though they no longer belong to God, they’re not born of Hell. That’s how Sasha became immortal. A Skia followed her inside a church in St. Petersburg and killed her.”
“Who brought her back?”
“Jax.”
“How? If he went inside—”
“He died trying to save her.” Denys gave me a solemn look. “He made the ultimate sacrifice because he loved her, and God gave him back his life.”
“The Mephisto Covenant.” Would Phoenix ever die to save me? I didn’t think so. Oh, he liked me, lusted after me, and I had no doubt we’d be friends for all eternity – but he was way too selfish to off himself on my behalf. Still, wouldn’t it be amazing for someone to love me that much? I couldn’t imagine it at all.
Kyros appeared first, quickly followed by Jax, Sasha, and Ty. Phoenix and Zee were no-shows, which made me glad. It said a lot about my character, but I didn’t mind telling a fib to this group – lying to Phoenix would have bothered me.
His face creased with worry, Kyros came to me a
nd grasped my upper arms, inspecting me. “Are you all right? Where were you? We did a mental search for Denys and found him at the Rose & Crown, but you weren’t there.” He shot an angry look at Denys. “Where the hell was she while you were drunk, doing the barmaid?”
“How do you know what—”
“I saw you! You were so drunk, I couldn’t wake you up. I looked all over the pub, fanned out across London hunting for her. We finally decided she’d stayed here, and was maybe somewhere in the house, or lost in the—”
“I asked Denys to take me to church, so he did and left me there and came back for me a couple of hours later. Don’t be mad at him. He was just doing what I asked.”
His hands tightened on my arms. “Mariah, you have to understand the danger. If Eryx finds you, if he were to take you, he could—”
“Look, this was just something I had to do, and now it’s done, and I’d prefer to skip the lecture.” I pulled away and stepped back. “I apologize for worrying everybody, but it’s very hard to be here, not knowing when I can ever leave.”
Instantly, his expression softened and I felt awful for playing on his sympathy. It added insult to the injury of my lie.
“So, you know.”
I jerked a nod. “I know.”
“Are you going to stay?”
“Yes. Right now, I’m going to get something to eat, then get ready for Jordan’s visit.”
They all looked at each other before Key said, “She’s not going to make it tonight, Mariah. She went to visit Matthew today, and while she was there, he made a miraculous recovery. She went home with him and stayed late, and now she says she’s way too tired and emotionally wrung out to visit. She’ll come tomorrow night, after the winter ball they’re having at her school.”
“A miraculous recovery? How? Did Jordan heal him? Isn’t that forbidden?”
“She says she didn’t, and I believe her, because if she had, Lucifer would have taken her out immediately. We don’t know how it happened, but she’s elated, as you can imagine.”
“Yes, I can.” I wondered how he’d been healed? It was odd, unexpected, and too coincidental, but I’d most likely never know, and since I was beginning to feel sick at my stomach with hunger pangs, I opted not to be overly concerned about Matthew. I was disappointed not to see Jordan, but on the other hand, I’d feel the need to tell her what happened with Eryx, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
The Mephisto Mark: The Redemption of Phoenix Page 27
